So now this president, in an apparent bid to back the smart-money bet he really is the second coming of Beelzebub, the Bible’s “prince of the demons,” asserts “it’s a very scary time for young men in America.”

“My whole life, I’ve heard you’re innocent until proven guilty. But now, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” this president said last month in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

Then his son, the Junior, said that in general he was more afraid for his sons than for his daughters, because the former may one day be falsely accused of sexual assault in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

“This is a very, very … this is a very difficult time,” adds this president.

Why, yes it is, thank you very much, Beelzebub and Junior. It pretty much couldn’t be any worse, for those who used to like to think the arc of history bent in at least small ways in the direction of progress.

But one of the things not contributing to making this a very, very, very difficult time is the success of a new women’s movement aimed at undoing the age-old power-mad patriarchy that from mere frequent pawing right on up to rape has tried to keep half the people in the world under its ugly thumb.

Of course it might help if we didn’t have a president who is on tape saying that being “a star” gives him the right to “grab ‘em by the” private parts. “You can do anything.”

No, you can’t, and most of us don’t want to, uninvited. But this president, like his predecessor Bill Clinton, and many other men of privilege throughout the world since the dawn of time, confuse sex with dominance, which is what they really care about, because something is wrong with them. They don’t actually like women, but perversely still want to show their frat brothers, through their brutal approach, that they have dominion over all females.

So maybe in a sense we owe some small debt of gratitude to these sick masters of the universe. It’s probably easier to rally millions of women and their male allies for Pussy Hat marches and other demonstrations of the fact that it’s finally over, fellas, when a demonstrably bad actor is our president than if a good guy — or woman — was president.

It is the artists among us as usual who have captured the current moment most succinctly. “Men are scared that women will laugh at them. … women are scared that men will kill them. I hold my keys between my fingers,” the extraordinary Australian Courtney Barnett sings.

You want to know about “scary,” Beelzebub & Son? Imagine, if you can, being a woman, any woman, who just wants to take a walk in the park without being murdered for who she is. But such men can’t understand what scary really means.

Some of the jokers outed in the proper recent takedowns of media millionaires and potentate politicians are rubbing their devilish little paws together and plotting a comeback. So far, the trial balloons have been shot down. Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi was removed from his CBC radio show in October 2014 after allegations of sexual violence from several women. This October, he tried to put himself back in the picture in an essay in The New York Review of Books headlined “Reflections from a Hashtag,” a boo-hoo about the pain of for four years living a life of “public toxicity.” In a bad last few paragraphs, he tells of flirting with a woman who happily doesn’t recognize him on a Paris-bound train, and how proud he was of himself for not jumping her bones. It went over in the intellectual community about as well as Louis C.K.’s return to standup has been received by women comics he assaulted.

Time’s still up, dudes.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.